Windows Azure - A Cloud OS

Today, Microsoft jumped on the “cloud computing” bandwagon with its announcement of Windwos Azure - “a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform.”

Aside from buzz words and tech speak, what does this actually mean? Basically it gives Microsoft application developers a solution to host and manage their websites in a “cloud” environment - meaning a scalable, managed environment that makes development and deployment easier. For us web developers (yes, we build our products with ASP.Net), it is supposed to help us to quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute our applications and services. At 48Web, we are in the process of ramping up our first product launch and will likely be using Windows Azure for our infrastructure.

This is BIG news following the recent announcement by Amazon to support Windows hosting in it’s cloud product - Amazon EC2.

From the announcement:

The Azure™ Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and
services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services
Platform provides a range of functionality to build applications that
span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios and includes a cloud
operating system and a set of developer services. Fully interoperable
through the support of industry standards and web protocols such as
REST and SOAP, you can use the Azure services individually or together,
either to build new applications or to extend existing ones.

Update: Although they have a big “Try It Now” button on the front of the Azure informational pages - there is no way to register and all the download links are dead. Fail…

Update: Also I wanted to note that I don’t see actual prices, but they claim it is based on consumption and is “attractive with the market”.

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Amazon EC2 News

Today Amazon announced the general availability of EC2 - the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (I think that means it is out of beta). This means it now comes with a Service Level Agreement - which one would think will dramatically increase adoption rates by medium-large sized companies. The SLA provides a 99.95% availability commitment.

Amazon Web Services also announce the availability of the beta for EC2 running Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

Amazon EC2 will provide an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees. Pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour.

They also provided insights into future plans for 2009 to help companies using their services plan for future roll outs. These enhancements include:

• Load balancing - Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
• Auto-scaling - Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
• Cloud monitoring - Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
• Management Console - Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

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